Instant Snake Salad
by Omnicat
Summary: Unhinging your jaw and swallowing a watermelon whole is the most fun a man can have without taking his clothes off, or so they say. Loki is already mostly naked and snakes don't wear clothes, but that's not going to stop him.


**Title:** Instant Snake Salad

**Author:** Omnicat

**Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** Kenneth Branagh & co's _Thor_, Alan Taylor & co's _Thor: the Dark World_, Taika Waititi & co's _Thor: Ragnarok_, and the Russo brothers & co's _Avengers: Infinity War_.

**Warnings: **None.

**Characters & Relationships:** Loki x Jane & Darcy

**Summary:** Unhinging your jaw and swallowing a watermelon whole is the most fun a man can have without taking his clothes off, or so they say. Loki is already mostly naked and snakes don't wear clothes, but that's not going to stop him. **/ 1699 words**

**Author's Note:** Enjoy!

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

**Instant Snake Salad**

"You turn into snakes," Jane repeated, voice flat and face blank. She was leaning away from him in her beach chair less subtly than she probably intended.

"You're not fond of snakes then, I take it?"

"I can't say that I am."

"We'll work on it," Loki promised.

"Like hell we –"

"What kind of snake are we talking about, though?" Darcy interrupted, looking up from her hand screen device. "Like, one of those cute tiny ones you could feed its own tail and wear as a bracelet, or the big monster kind that eats people whole?"

"Whichever," he said dismissively. He pointedly looked away from Darcy and toward Jane. "Remind me again why we invited her along on our couple's retreat?"

"It's not a couple's retreat. Your brother and his friends are in the next cabin over preparing a luau."

"Yes, but _this_ section of the beach is ours. I cordoned it off and everything."

He couldn't help but notice that nobody was bothering the little witch and her sexbot in _their_ territory. He didn't even feel any urge to give them a taste of his misery. Mind control might be involved.

"The food smells were making me hungry and Sif nearly broke my fingers with a spoon when I tried to have a taste," Darcy said, utterly unapologetic. "I'm a culinary refugee."

"And she brought me a new drink," Jane added, just as shameless.

She made undignified slurping noises through her brightly-colored curly straw and there was still a white smear of sun screen on her nose. The things he would overlook for this woman, honestly. But even Loki's magnanimousness had its limits.

"Servants should be neither seen nor heard."

Both women broke out in riotous laughter.

"I could rid us of her with a flick of my wrist and hire you a dozen more well-behaved serving girls and lab monkeys," he pointed out. Again.

"You could," Jane agreed, stirring the ice in her fruity drink with a knowing grin. "But since you need to be on your best behavior to keep your Earth Visa and be with me, and yet you keep defaulting to 'let me murder her' instead of 'let me teleport her into her grandmother's compost heap', I don't think you will."

Ah, but the little whiffs of peasant were well worth keeping a woman like her.

"Hey! Don't give him ideas!"

He eyed Darcy speculatively, a smirk making the corners of his mouth twitch. "Hmmm..."

"Jane, look what you did," she whined.

"Bring me a couple of slices of watermelon and I promise to tell him he'll be sleeping on the couch for a week if he teleports you somewhere gross," Jane said.

"Make that a month. He's a thousand years old, a week is nothing."

"Two weeks."

"Three."

"Done." Jane looked over at him. "You'll be sleeping alone for three weeks if you teleport her somewhere weird."

"I'll be sure to teleport her somewhere entirely ordinary," he said solemnly. "How does a busy intersection sound?"

"Attaboy."

Darcy departed with a roll of her eyes. Loki wriggled his fingers to levitate Jane from her beach chair into his lap, and laid his hands on her hips, toying with the knot that held up the airy cloth she wore as a skirt.

"Some day, _soon_, you and I will take a vacation without her," he said. "Or my brother. Or any of the other nuisances."

She reached back with the hand not holding her drink and patted his hair. "Of course we will. Just as soon as everybody's done celebrating that half the galaxy is no longer dead. She got dusted right in front of me, you know, it was pretty traumatic."

"At least it was swift and painless. I'll have you know that _I_ died quite gruesomely by comparison."

"I know, I know." Jane twisted around for a quick peck to his lips. Cupping the back of her head, he drew her back in for a much longer, more passionate kiss. Eventually she pushed him away to catch her breath and chuckled, "I'm glad you're back too, you green-eyed monster."

An unexpectedly long time later, Darcy returned, bearing a plastic tub containing a whole melon and assorted dishes and cutlery.

"You just missed the best melon-carving contest," she said gleefully, depositing the little tub on her beach chair. "The bug boy spun this huge web between a couple of trees to keep everything from landing in the sand and then they started tossing watermelons into the air for Clint and Val and Bucky to throw knives at. The winner was the one who could slice the same melon into the most pieces."

"So who won?" Jane asked.

"That's the best part: I have no idea. They kept mixing up their melons, or aiming for the same one at same time. They're getting _seriously_ drunk back there."

"They didn't invite me?!" Loki exclaimed, dumbfounded.

"I thought you didn't want to be disturbed on our 'couple's retreat'," Jane said with a smirk.

"They had a knife throwing contest and they didn't invite _me_," he repeated, growing more and more indignant. "None of those amateurs even come close to matching my skill with the knife!"

Jane started shaking suspiciously against his chest.

Darcy plucked her why-would-anyone-call-that-a-phone from her cleavage and waved it around with a bit too much relish. "Too bad. I recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube. It's going viral without you."

Jane developed a suspicious cough.

Loki felt a powerful urge to teleport the wench into the nearest seafood restaurant dumpster and try his chances with Jane's threat about sleeping alone.

"Anyway, you want some too?" she asked, sitting down astride her beach chair like a brute and fishing a knife from the plastic tub. "'Cause tough luck, I'm not cutting it for you."

Jane sucked in a startled breath. "Darcy, put down the knife, I have an idea!"

"What?"

"Hey Loki," Jane said, voice smothered with badly suppressed laughter. She shot him an unconvincing look of innocence. "Do you know what you're also better at than anyone else?"

"Many, many things," he answered, perhaps a bit heatedly.

"Turning into snakes."

He stared at her flatly. "Yes. There are few more talented or experienced shapeshifters in all the realms. What's that got to do with anything?"

"The kind that can swallow a man whole."

"Not that I don't like where this is going as a matter of principle, but what's _that_ got to do with anything?"

"Or swallow a _watermelon_ whole."

He stared harder. Jane's eyes were twinkling, like they did when she was about to drive into a storm.

"I think I've changed my mind about snakes. You may or may not be able to throw a knife at a watermelon better than the others, but you're the only one who can do _that_ to one."

Well, when she put it like _that_.

"You are a genius and I love you." He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, scooped her up, vacated his beach chair, deposited Jane into it, and snapped his fingers at Darcy. "Servant woman, wipe off the boob sweat and ready your recording device. The internet is _mine_."

Darcy doubled over with laughter, but scrambled out of her chair and wiped her 'phone' on her bathing suit-covered side. "Dude, you are such a dick. And I don't even care. This is gonna be awesome."

She and Jane crowded together behind the screen of her multi-gadget while Loki straightened out his stylish Midgardian-style beach breeches, slicked back his newly cut hair, and picked a nice, photogenic spot. Unmarred sand all around, shining sea and bright blue sky in the distance, the sun unobtrusively off to the side. Perfect.

He raised the watermelon in one hand, planted the other in his side, and faced the camera. "Greetings, Midgardians. I am Loki, Prince of Asgard and rightful King of Jotunheim. Behold my power."

Leaving the melon to float in a slow swirl of pale blue light, he closed his eyes, focused on the magic inside of him, and willed his body to change. One form faded into another, and within moments he was curled elegantly in the sand.

"Feast your eyes!" he said, and smoothly lowered the melon toward his mouth.

He opened his jaw. Wide, and wider, and wider. The melon touched the edge of his mouth, aaand a little wider still. He couldn't see how much of the fruit was still left, but Jane was grinning fit to burst in the corner of his eye.

Jane noisily slurped the last of her drink from the bottom of her glass.

"Jane, quiet, you're ruining the video," Darcy hissed.

"_Nothing_ can ruin this," Jane said.

Oh! There he had it. Widening his coils, he closed his jaw over the top of the watermelon and gulped – and gulped – and gulped – until he felt it had found a good place to settle.

"_Tada!"_ he sang, facing the camera with a flourish of his tail.

"Woohoo!" Darcy said, and Jane lost it, contorting fit to make a snake proud with the force of her laughter.

To a chorus of hilarity and encouragement, Loki slithered this way and that, showing off the fruit in his belly.

"Question, though," Jane said, out of breath and wiping her hair from her face. "How are you going to change back with that thing in your stomach?"

Loki froze.

"Oh my god," Darcy gasped. "He can't change back until he's no longer pregnant with a fruit salad."

"More like pregnant with the salad bowl."

And they dissolved into screaming laughter again.

He looked down at his snake's body thoughtfully and mentally shrugged. "Nothing I can't handle. Watch and learn, mortals. Darcy? Camera, chop hop."

He returned to his Asgardian form with a wince. The bulge was no less prominent this way. Talk about feeling bloated.

"Watch – " – he panted – "– and learn."

And with a single firm clench of his abdominal muscles, the watermelon's shell cracked into many pieces, and from one breath to the next, he had his flat, hard, muscled abdomen back.

"And that's how it's done," he said with a final flourish and a perfectly executed bow.


End file.
